The field of the invention relates generally to air traffic management and aircraft operator fleet management, and more specifically, to a method and system for collaborative planning and negotiating trajectories amongst stakeholders.
Facing increased levels of air traffic combined with a need to support more efficient operations, increased collaboration between aircraft operators and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) is needed. Currently, operators provide only basic data such as departure and arrival airports and schedule in the days and hours before a flight. While this allows very crude planning of demand for airspace and runways, it is limited in the amount of detail it can provide for both ANSPs and operators to allocate resources. A more detailed flight plan with information such as cruising altitude, speed and the enroute airways that the flight would prefer to take are not provided until shortly (typically less than 1 hour) before departure. Some aircraft (and in the planned future Air Traffic Management (ATM) system most aircraft) can down link a full detailed 4D Trajectory from their Flight Management System (FMS) to air traffic control (ATC). However, this cannot be done until all the necessary parameters (including weights) are entered in the FMS, which does not typically happen until just before departure. Because a detailed description of the 4D trajectory is not available early in the planning process, adjustments to the aircraft's flight must be more tactical and reactionary, significantly reducing the efficiency of the flight.
Prior attempts to solve this problem involve sharing the flight plan between the operator and the ANSP. However, the flight plan does not include the full trajectory, and includes only named points and a single cruise altitude and speed. The lack of the full trajectory and intent information that is provided in this system limits the type of planning and therefore the efficiency that can be achieved. At least some known methods involve only the computation of the flight plan route itself and do not include the generation of a trajectory based on the flight plan and communication of this trajectory and intent information to the ANSP from an aircraft operator and do not provide a flexible method of specifying the output or distribution of that trajectory to an ANSP.